The baby is an invention.

The baby is inventive! She teaches herself to speak—her language is charming and wrong.

The baby is wrong; you are not allowed to say that.

The baby is alive alive and disgusting.

The baby should come with a trigger warning.

The baby is as luxurious as compost, sweetly foul. The baby is covered in a delicate bloom of mold, skin blotched with psychedelic colors. I can’t look away.

The baby has an elaborate microbiome which is slowly conquering my own, malicious but as graceful as long hair underwater.

The baby’s existence is a definitive and damning rejection of the global monoculture.

The baby is infinite, the baby has no boundaries, the baby is a Ponzi scheme, the baby is multilevel marketing at its finest.

Just like the universe the baby is always expanding.

The baby is a choking hazard.

The baby has such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can resist.

The baby is a laboratory, a dark garden of my mistakes.

The baby is evolving, ever-terrifying.

The baby makes me furious. I am sick with a rage so tangible I hold it in my hand.

The baby is gauche.

The baby is an etiquette nightmare, Marie Antoinette in a diaper.

The baby is merciless, oblivious.

The baby has ruined me.

The baby loves germs, loves me.

The baby is the ultimate anarchist, the baby is the anti-christ, the baby fucks up the algorithm.

The baby is a velociraptor, predatory and destined for extinction.

The baby is a verifiable rock-and-roll legend.

The baby uses up the oxygen in the room, no matter how big the room.

The baby obliterates my mind.

The baby is a divine comedy.

The baby is the divine comedy. The baby is the great worm in the third circle of hell, three ravenous mouths, never satisfied.

The baby is all the circles of hell collapsed into one with remarkably long lashes.

The baby is paradise. I sigh and am complete.

The baby is not sacred. She turns the stiff pages of a board book mumbling “where the fuck is the sheep?” (The baby is profane.)

The baby is a book of jokes whose punchline is always me.

The baby is a bully, she makes me slip on a banana peel.

The baby is the straight man in our comedy duo, she makes me be the clown.

The baby has no respect.

The baby is not fucking around.

The baby is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I have no way to know if this is true or not.

The baby is a promise or maybe just a promissory note.

An IOU. A DUI.

The baby was a surprise, an elemental joy that complicated everything.

The baby was the end of an era.

The baby is the birth of cool and marks a significant development in post-bebop jazz.

The baby is weeping.

The baby is the reason I am weeping, the noise I make is machinery gone wrong.

The baby does not understand consent.

The baby is not an abolitionist, the idea is laughable.

The baby is the warden.

The baby is a gift. The baby is a gift horse, I check her mouth for teeth every day.

The baby has a jaw that unhinges like a snake’s.

This is called mandibular dislocation. All the better to swallow me whole.

The baby is up on her hind legs, what the fuck is she doing?